Dear Blog Readers,
Raymond is fifty-eight years old and he is writing to his seven-year-old granddaughter. He does not know when she will read this. He wrote it anyway, because she showed him, without knowing she was showing him, that what he had carried for forty years had a name. This letter is quiet and enormous in equal measure. I think it will stay with you.
Be kind to yourself and remember to nourish your body, mind, and that place inside you that makes you who you are.
Your blog moderator, Kira
**********
A Letter to My Granddaughter, Marisol, Who Taught Me My Own Name
Marisol,
You are seven years old as I write this, which means you will not read it for a long time. I am writing it anyway because I am fifty-eight years old and I have learned, finally and late, that some things need to be said even when the person you are saying them to is not ready to hear them yet. Even when you are not sure you are ready to say them. Even when the words are new in your mouth and you keep biting down on them by accident.
I am writing this because of what happened last spring, when your mother told me what you were going through, and something in me that had been very still for a very long time stood up and said: I know this. I know this shape.
I want to tell you about my life. The parts of it you do not know. I want to tell you so that when you are old enough to read this, you will know that you did not come from nowhere. That this thing that happened to you has a longer history than you, and that history includes me, your Lolo, who spent forty years not having a word for what he was carrying.
I came to Canada when I was thirty-one. Your Lola and I came together, which is the only reason I survived it. Immigration is not a word that tells you what it actually is. What it actually is is this: you remove yourself from every context in which you make sense and you place yourself somewhere new and you are expected to continue making sense anyway. You are expected to work and to smile and to be grateful, which I was, genuinely, I was grateful, and also I was terrified in a way I had no permission to say out loud because we had chosen this, we had wanted this, other people had it so much harder, I was a grown man.
I was a grown man and I was not eating.
I could not have told you that at the time. I would not have used those words. What I would have said, what I did say, the few times Lola asked, was that I wasn’t hungry. That the food here tasted different, which was true. That my stomach was unsettled from the adjustment, which was also true. These were true things I used to cover a truer thing, which was that eating had become, somewhere in the crossing of that ocean, something I could not always do.
It was not every day. That is the thing about it that made it so easy to explain away. There were weeks that were fine. Weeks I ate everything and felt almost like myself. Then the weight of a new place and a language that was mine but also not mine and a job that did not care what I had been before and the cold, Marisol, the cold, which in those first winters felt personal, like the country itself was rejecting me, and in those weeks I would come home and sit at the table and look at the food Lola had made and not be able to reach for it. Not because it wasn’t good. Because something had gone quiet inside me that was supposed to be the part that wanted things.
Lola was worried. She showed her worry by making more food, different food, food from home that required ingredients she took the bus to three different stores to find. I ate it when I could. I thanked her every time. I did not tell her what was happening because I did not know what was happening. There is no word in Tagalog for what I had. There is no word in English that I had access to. The words that existed were for women, were for teenagers, were for people in television movies who were nothing like me: a Filipino man in his thirties in a winter coat in Etobicoke, trying to hold himself together.
So I held myself together. The way men are taught to hold themselves together, which is to say: I did not hold myself together. I performed the holding together while everything inside did what it needed to do without my permission or my understanding.
It went on for years. Not every year the same. Recovery, I have learned, is not a straight line, and neither is the thing that comes before you know you need recovery. There were better years and harder years. I worked in construction for twenty years and then my body told me it was time to stop and I retired and your mother grew up and had you and your brother, and life moved the way life moves, which is to say it moved forward even when I was not sure I was moving with it.
Then last spring your mother told me about you, and I sat in my car in the parking lot of the Sobeys on Roncesvalles for a very long time.
I was not crying. I want you to know that so you do not feel responsible for my emotions, which are mine to manage. I was sitting very still because something had come clear that I had kept blurry for a very long time. I was sitting with the understanding that what you were going through had a name and that name belonged to me too, and that I had spent most of my adult life in a country with enough resources that I could have gotten help, and I hadn’t known to ask because I hadn’t known there was a question.
I want to be careful here, Marisol. I am not telling you this to make your story about me. Your story is yours. What you went through is yours. What you are recovering from is yours, and your mother tells me you are doing so well, and I am prouder of you than I know how to say in any language.
I am telling you this because I went and got help. Finally. At fifty-eight years old, because my seven-year-old granddaughter showed me, without knowing she was showing me, that what I had lived with had a name.
I found a group. I sat in a room, which was uncomfortable in ways I expected and ways I did not expect. I was the oldest person there by many years. I was one of very few men. I was one of very few people who had come to this understanding late in life, with decades of lived experience sitting in the chair alongside me.
And still: I was not the only one. That is the thing I want you to hear. I was not the only one. There was a man named David who was fifty-three and had come to it differently but arrived at the same room. There was a woman named Hyun-ji who laughed at something I said in my second session, not meanly, genuinely, and I felt, in that moment, like a real person who was allowed to be in a room.
It is a small thing. I know it sounds like a small thing. But I had spent forty years feeling like what I was carrying did not qualify me for any room where it might be addressed, and then I was in a room where it did, and a woman laughed warmly at something I said, and I was a real person.
You are seven. You do not know yet how long certain silences can last. I hope you never have to learn that the way I learned it. I hope the work you are doing now, so young, so brave, your mother tells me so brave, is the work that means you never have to sit in a parking lot at fifty-eight realizing things about yourself that you should have known at thirty.
I hope you read this when you are older and you think: I already knew all of that. I hope this letter is unnecessary. I hope your recovery is so complete and so ordinary that my story sounds like ancient history from another world.
And if it doesn’t, if any of what I have written sounds familiar, if you are reading this at whatever age you are and something in you is saying: I know this shape, then I want you to know that help exists. That it is never too late. That I know this personally, in my body, in my fifty-eight year old body that is learning, slowly and improbably, to want things again.
I love you, Marisol. I am learning to say that more often too. Your Lola says I always said it with food, with the things I built for you, with showing up. She is right. But I am also learning to say it with words.
You are my greatest teacher. You do not know it yet, and that is exactly as it should be.
All my love, forever,
Lolo Raymond